October 13, 2010

Odessa

AHHH this beat has been stuck in my head for daysss...

October 12, 2010

There's More To Life Than This


“You need to dream your life with great care, instead of living it merely as a party. Weary of searching for the day, you will taste the night.”
-Arthur Cravan, “Words”

Gemma Slack Spring/Summer 2011 Collection

I love it and I want it...







From her previous collection...

October 11, 2010

"...To Make People Believe What?"

"What twisted people we are.
How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down.
How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes,
and the eyes of others…
And all for what?
To hide what?
To make people believe what?”
-Roberto Bolaño

Anjelica Huston & Valentino

One of my favorite editorials feauturing Anjelica Huston from Vogue Italia taken by Bob Richardson.
Valentino Fall/Winter 1972/1923





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Blackout

Fragile Things

“She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon.
You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong.
Passion flows through her like a river of blood.
She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell.
All your tomorrows start here."

- Neil Gaiman, "Fragile Things"

October 10, 2010

"...Reach us through the flesh."



"Surreal State" By Mert Marcus

Kristamas Klousch

"The Corset That Stings (Das Stachelkorsett)" by Günter Blum, 1993

"Chains" by Ralph Gibson

Günter Blum

Face




Fun Times

October 8, 2010

Hit

I forgot how much I don't like clowns... but Bjork, I love...

(1991)

October 4, 2010

Dora Maar

Pablo Picasso's muse and lover...
Dora Maar by Man Ray. (1936).


"Before meeting Picasso, Maar was already famous as a photographer. She also painted. She met Picasso in January 1936 on the terrace of the Café les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, when she was 29 years old and he 54. The famous poet Paul Éluard, who was with Picasso, had to introduce them. Picasso was attracted by her beauty and self-mutilation (she cut her fingers and the table playing "the knife game"; he got her bloody gloves and exhibited them on a shelf in his apartment). She spoke Spanish fluently, so Picasso was even more fascinated. Their relationship lasted nearly nine years.

Maar became the rival of Picasso's blonde mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had a newborn daughter with Picasso, named Maya. Picasso often painted beautiful, sad Dora, who suffered because she was sterile, and called her his "private muse." For him she was the "woman in tears" in many aspects. During their love affair, she suffered from his moods, and hated that in 1943 he had found a new lover, Françoise Gilot. Picasso and Paul Éluard sent Dora to their friend, the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, who treated her with psychoanalysis.

She made herself better known in the art world with her photographs of the successive stages of the completion of Guernica, which Picasso painted in his workshop on the rue des Grands Augustins, and other photographic portraits of Picasso. Together, she and Picasso studied printing with Man Ray."

Portrait of Pablo Picasso.

"Untitled" (1934).

"Pere Ubu" (1936).

"Silence" (1935).



"Jeux Interdits" (1935).



"Empreintes de pieds sur le sable" (1931).





"Baigneuse" (1931).

"29. Rue d'Astorg" (1937).

"Untitled" (c. 1940).

Heart & Soul


Video clips from the film, "Invasion of the Bee Girls" (1973)

Judith with the head of Holofernes

Judith with the head of Holofernes, Lucas Cranach The Elder. (c. 1530)

In the apocryphal Book of Judith, the Jewish heroine enters the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, seduces him, gets him drunk and chops off his head.

Cranach's Judith is a court beauty with pink cheeks, an almost Mona Lisa enigma to her expression, flowing golden locks and white cleavage visible beneath three rich necklaces. Her rakishly angled velvet hat and tight bodice make her the height of fashion - except that in one of her white-gloved hands she holds a wide-bladed sword aloft, and lifts a handkerchief to expose Holofernes's severed head.

The warrior's head is bearded and its dead eyes roll: the muscles and tubes in his neck are opened for our inspection in a red mass. Judith takes all this in her stride. The red, yellow and white hues of her skin, hair and clothes are unblemished, her richly textured sleeves unruffled - even her sword is clean of blood. It's as if she is acting out the part of the seducer-assassin in some courtly entertainment.

It's a far cry from earlier images of Judith that went out of their way to deny the story's sexual content. Donatello's 15th-century sculpture of Judith gives her a hood, robes and a narrow collar, so that almost no flesh is visible. Botticelli's painting from the 1470s has her dreamily pure as she walks home, sword in hand, a servant carrying the head.

These virtuous Judiths clearly gave nothing of themselves and took no pleasure in Holofernes's tent. Cranach's Judith is more paradoxical; the very clothes that had been introduced into the iconography to stress her chastity become sexually charged as she exposes the gory head to the shocked but fascinated viewer.

October 3, 2010

Edoardo Ballerini


I think I may be in love with Edoardo Ballerini from Boardwalk Empire. My attraction towards him might have something to do with him playing Rudolph Valentino in "Good Night Valentino"... Oh lord.

Franz Von Bayros

“Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!”
-Marquis de Sade, "Philosophy in the Bedroom", 1795.

(Artwork by Franz Von Bayros)

Mademoiselle Lucifer

“For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.”
- Antonin Artaud

(Photograph by John Swannell)

Sir Joshua Reynolds (Part 2)

(Click to enlarge image)
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. (1789)

Cupid Undoing Venus's Belt. (1788)

Venus. (1785)

Cupid as a Link Boy. (1773)